Is your Customer Service Team Set up for Success?

What It Takes to Have Exceptional Customer Service

In Kenya today and even in the world in general, Customer Support has evolved and good customer service has come a long way from the traditional help desk.?

Kenyan companies are aware that they need to match up with the trends and expectations of the modern customer.

?So whether you are a small business building a customer support team for the first time or an existing established business evaluating how your support function could work better, it is important to note that in these modern times, great customer service is an expectation, rather than an added benefit.

?As a business owner, it is important to take time and plan on how you want to build your customer support team . For any business, it is important to not only provide great customer service but to do so consistently.

?A Study has shown that no matter how much customers love a brand, one in three (32%) will walk away from a business after a single bad experience.?

?Great customer experience leaves customers feeling heard and appreciated. It minimizes friction, maximizes efficiency, and maintains a human element.

This in turn results in customers buying more, being more loyal, and sharing their experience with friends.?

?Customer service and support impact every aspect of a business from marketing to customer acquisition and retention to profit.

It is therefore worthwhile spending the time to build an excellent customer service support team.?

Here are some statistics to ponder on:

• Customer service contributes to higher customer retention, which directly impacts your bottom line. Just a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profit.?
• 96% of customers say customer service is an important factor in their loyalty to a brand.
• Great customer support also boosts your marketing: 72% of customers will share a positive experience with six or more people, helping you reach new customers.?
• ?67% of customers say they would pay more for a better customer service experience.

?What Really Makes for a Successful Customer Care Team?

?Let us explore a few ways you could set up your customer service team for success

1. Define and Interpret What "Great Customer Service" Is for Your Company

What it takes to deliver excellent customer service for one business may not be the same for another because of the product and service, the industry, the customers, and their preferred communication channels.

So when building a customer service team, you need to decide and articulate the specifics of service quality that your company will provide and include your entire team in crafting that definition.?

As a business owner or manager, you need to align the meaning with the company values while providing tangible guidelines for your team and also identify a way to measure their success.?

You may want to discuss with your team an instance when each of you, as individuals, experienced great customer service, how it made you feel, and then see how you can track and measure that feeling.

Popular metrics include customer retention rate, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

??2. Decide What Channels Your Customer Service Team Will Manage And Focus On

In the quest to impress upon your customers, some businesses have been tempted to say that they would be available on every channel.

However, when starting out especially, the teams are often lean and may not be in a position to provide great consistent customer service across all possible channels.?

The modern customer is a digital customer . There are multiple options available in the market which include email communication , phones, messaging Apps, forums, online customer service such as social media, live chats, videos, knowledge base (FAQs) as well as in-person customer service.

It is therefore important to find out what your customers are using, establish what your customers naturally gravitate toward, and do some research on your target audience to make sure you are available on the platforms they are already using.

?3. Recruit The Right People

In order to provide reliable and high-quality customer support it is crucial to find and hire a great customer service team. The employees need to be passionate about customer service and must possess the right skills for the job.

As a business owner, you need to define both hard and soft skills. You need to specify any technical skills, licenses or software knowledge that may be required.

For instance, in regard to hard skills, customer service representatives need to be able to navigate through a point-of-sale system in order to be efficient.

However, the demand for soft skills is rapidly increasing across positions and industries. It is imperative for the customer service team to possess strong soft skills such as:

• Clear Communication
• Patience and Empathy
• Attentiveness
• Ability to Adapt
• Time Management Skills
• Persuasion Skills
• Ability to Handle Surprises
• Good Problem Solving Skills
• Listening skills
• Friendliness
• Strong organizational skills

4. Onboard New Employees Correctly

Once the team is hired, the onboarding process should involve teaching the employees about the company culture and your company’s approach to service, as well as the products and services they will support.

Ensure to have a recruitment strategy to anticipate and avoid skill gaps and grow your team in line with the business demand.

You should also work with other departments to align your hiring goals with the growth trajectory of the business.

Your customer experience is only as good as your employee experience. Make sure you carefully consider ways to retain your best talent by buying into your employee value proposition as well as availing training opportunities for existing employees in order for them to continue growing and learning in their roles.

?5. Measure Customer Service Performance

You need to set objectives for your customer service department and measure them periodically in order to drive better performance. Identify and understand which metrics are important for your business and industry.

Get to understand your company’s value proposition and choose the high-level KPIs that support your company’s objectives.

For instance, do you compete on customer experience, where satisfaction measures are of primary importance or do you compete on cost, where efficiency and productivity measures are most important??

Once you identify this, set customer feedback and employee feedback systems to improve the customer service levels on a frequent basis.

?6. Gather Actionable Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is of great value because you can pool it together, analyze it and identify what steps should be taken thereafter.

Most customer service software are able to produce detailed reports, but as a business, you need to identify which numbers really matter to your team and what you need to do about them.?

The data gathered from the feedback received about your customers’ experiences and expectations for your product and/ or service can be of great help in:

• Identifying unknown product and service flaws.
• Helping prioritize projects according to the customer’s perspective.
• Improving customer retention and revenue.
• Showing what’s working well that may benefit from more attention.??
• Improving collaboration and efficiency between team members and functions.

?As a manager, you need to ensure that you are looking at the data that really matters. As you build your customer service team, it’s important to track the right metrics that will translate to an excellent customer experience and ensure your team is equipped with the right skills to improve those metrics.?

There are numerous ways to collect feedback about your customers’ experiences and expectations.

?Here are some of the popular methods;

• Online surveys: Identify customer pain points, use data for setting goals, gauge individual service agent performance.
• ?Customer behavior mapping: See steps a customer takes to complete an action, like signing up for a newsletter, to uncover customer needs and improve their experience.
• ?Direct calls with customers: Customers may open up more and provide greater detail when conversing over the phone.
• ?Focus groups: A quick way to hear from a cross-section of customers in their own words.
• ?Social listening: Track, analyze, and respond to conversations about the company that are happening outside of the company’s social media channels.

In order to avoid reporting fatigue, consider zeroing in on the data that will provide the best feedback about your customer service goals by understanding what you are looking to report and why.

?7. Invest in The Right Tools

Battling with slow or unhelpful tools is a costly waste of your support team’s time and energy that would be much more usefully spent helping customers.?

An important way to meet growing customer expectations is by providing team members the tools they need to deliver outstanding service, and by giving customers the tools they want to get their questions answered in a way that’s convenient and quick for them.

Investing in the right technology helps build a fruitful customer service department and by picking the right tools, you make life easier for your support team, enhance your brand’s overall effectiveness at interacting with customers, and also guarantee customer satisfaction.

When it comes to selecting the appropriate customer service software for your company you need to establish what functionality you need, what are your “nice to have” features versus necessary features and what apps are needed to integrate with the chosen software.

???Tools to Improve Your Customer Service Team’s Success

• Customer relationship management (CRM): CRM tools like Salesforce , HubSpot , and Monday.com help businesses track and manage sales and marketing efforts with prospects and existing customers.
• Bug reporting: Bug reporting tools like JIRA, Basecamp, ClickUp, and Asana enable service reps to report bugs and feature requests, keep them organized, and check on the report status.
• ?Help desk: Help desk software (i.e. Zendesk, Zoho , and Freshdesk) can do a variety of tasks from streamlining tickets from multiple sources, customized ticket routing, an internal knowledge center of previously resolved issues, and tools for team members to collaborate on a customer ticket.
• ?Service training/learning management system (LMS): LMS tools such as Lessonly, AbsorbLMS, EduKool, and SAP Litmos enable you to build your own online training program and monitor training data to identify potential knowledge gaps.
• ?Chatbot: Chatbot tools like MobileMonkey, Olark, LiveAgent, and Drift enable you to provide live chat, real-time stats, and transcripts. Some tools unify chats across all channels, from Facebook messaging and SMS text to your website.

Customer service is ongoing work that must adapt over time as the market, your customers, and your team change, and as you learn. Building and managing a winning customer service team starts with understanding your customer’s needs, planning, having a clear intention, and tech tools upfront.

A good place to start is by building your team's capacity through a Tailored Customer Service Training designed to suit the needs and of your business and aligned to your industry of operation.

?Article Author

Jackie Wahome, a Customer Experience Trainer in Kenya with over 15 years of experience in Customer Experience across different industries in Kenya.

I help businesses make more and retain more customers through unrivalled Customer Experience.

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https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jackie-wahome-customer-experience-trainer-7b272554/

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